Flutterby™! : MediaWiki madness

Flutterby is closing in on 9 years, and a lot has changed in that time. I like the fact that I now load up the page and see entries from other people, Flutterby really is becoming the site I want to read.

However, occasionally I'll get grumbles from people who want something a little more personal, more oriented around me. A few years ago, TC even bought me a domain for that. I recently decided it was time to built that site.

I played around with various bits of software, even considered enhancing the system that runs this site to manage it, but eventually realized that, for all that I could do things slightly better than any other system out there, I just didn't have the time to do it right now.

I really liked TWiki, but when I installed it and played with it, it was really slow. Since I'd switched to Lighty (away from Apache) I was no longer in module interdependency hell, and I finally bit the bullet and accepted PHP into my heart and installed MediaWiki. A few extensions I've found worthwhile:

• Hex2Bit/Calendar is a simple calendar extension that works rather nicely. It has some problems with cleaned-up URLs that I haven't resolved yet, but it'll work for now.
• gmap (if that site has trouble loading, the GISWiki source for gmap worked for me) is a Google Maps extension that actually works (with a little tweaking) with 1.8, and that (albeit slightly clumsily) does a good job of letting you add paths and points to maps. In fact, in trying to convince some of the Marin Cyclists folks that they need to upgrade their web page, I've tossed in a few sample maps of upcoming rides, like the Mt Vision Ride that I'll be leading this coming Saturday (we leave at 9:00AM sharp from the Fairfax post office) or the Bovine Bakery Run.
• I've installed the OpenID extension but haven't played with it much yet.
• And I've also put in the Group Based Access Control Extension for fine grained content control, but I haven't yet got enough content up there of any sort to care who reads it.